while they re at war the true story of american families on the homefront

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Many Americans will never experience the gut-wrenching act of sending a loved one off to war, or the joy and stress of welcoming him or her home. Still less known to most of us are the anxiety-ridden moments between these two scenes, the day-to-day reality of life in a military family when a loved one is deployed in a combat zone. While They're at War takes us inside hearts and homes to illuminate the unseen aspects of this critical American story. We meet two very different women, Marissa Bootes and Beth Pratt, both newlyweds experiencing life alone at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, while their husbands are fighting in Iraq. Through the extraordinary stories of these and other military spouses, Kristin Henderson reveals the overwhelming effects of separation -- from fears of death to worries about financial stability and marital fidelity. She also explores the official and unofficial support systems that strain to help homefront families endure some of their greatest challenges.

Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities, sharing what troops really experience during deployment and back home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Drs. Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.

In her bestselling novels Kristin Hannah has plumbed the depths of friendship, the loyalty of sisters, and the secrets mothers keep. Now, in her most emotionally powerful story yet, she explores the intimate landscape of a troubled marriage with this provocative and timely portrait of a husband and wife, in love and at war. All marriages have a breaking point. All families have wounds. All wars have a cost. . . . Like many couples, Michael and Jolene Zarkades have to face the pressures of everyday life---children, careers, bills, chores---even as their twelve-year marriage is falling apart. Then an unexpected deployment sends Jolene deep into harm's way and leaves defense attorney Michael at home, unaccustomed to being a single parent to their two girls. As a mother, it agonizes Jolene to leave her family, but as a solider she has always understood the true meaning of duty. In her letters home, she paints a rose-colored version of her life on the front lines, shielding her family from the truth. But war will change Jolene in ways that none of them could have foreseen. When tragedy strikes, Michael must face his darkest fear and fight a battle of his own---for everything that matters to his family. At once a profoundly honest look at modern marriage and a dramatic exploration of the toll war takes on an ordinary American family, Home Front is a story of love, loss, heroism, honor, and ultimately, hope.

Ten films released between 9/11 and Gulf War II reflect raging debates about US foreign policy and what it means to be an American. Tracing the portrayal of America in the films Pearl Harbor (World War II); We Were Soldiers and The Quiet American (the Vietnam War); Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down and Kandahar (episodes of humanitarian intervention); Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom (vengeance in response to loss); Minority Report (futurist pre-emptive justice); and Fahrenheit 9/11 (an explicit critique of Bush's entire war on terror), Cynthia Weber presents a stimulating new study of how Americans construct their identity and the moral values that inform their foreign policy. This is not just another book about post-9/11 America. It introduces the concept of 'moral grammars of war', and explains how they are articulated: Many Americans asked in the wake of 9/11 – not only 'why do they hate us?' but 'what does it mean to be a moral America(n) and how might such an America(n) act morally in contemporary international politics? This text explores how these questions were answered at the intersections of official US foreign policy and post-9/11 popular films. It also details US foreign policy formation in relation to traditional US narratives about US identity 'who we think we were/are', 'who we wish we'd never been', 'who we really are', and 'who we might become' as well as in relation to their foundations in nationalist discourses of gender and sexuality. This book will be of great interest to students of American Studies, US Foreign Policy, Contemporary US History, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies.

When will the war finally come to an end? Home Front: Viet Nam and Families at War recounts the private ordeals of several families who bore the brunt of Americas war in Viet Nam. Their experiences, an ongoing tragedy since the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnamese soil, reveal the physical and psychological wounds of war wounds that dont discriminate between soldier and family. From the backwoods of Maine to the rugged wide open landscape of Montana, we meet a dozen soldiers and their families and hear their stories. Author Willard D. Gray knows the fallout firsthand. His oldest son spent two years and eighteen consecutive days in Viet Nam as a BAMC trained medic, most of his tour served in the bush or in the grist mill of an evac. hospital. When Willards son returned home in April 1970 without an honorable discharge, the Gray family endured several months of tension, anger, and disappointment. Tommy Gray had come home a completely changed young man. Exhaustive efforts by his family to upgrade his discharge status and remove the stigma placed upon him and those closest to him ultimately failed to reunite the family. But Willards crusade on behalf of his son soon grew to include others in the community who had also been traumatized and marginalized by the war. A national tragedy became a personal quest. Others who had been left to their own devices after the war, with no help from the government or their local communities, surely needed support.

World War I heralded a new global era of warfare, consolidating and expanding changes that had been building throughout the previous century, while also instituting new notions of war. The 1914-18 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an unprecedented use of civilian labor and resources for the war effort. Humanitarian relief programs for civilians became a common feature of modern society, while food became as significant as weaponry in the fight to win. Tammy M. Proctor argues that it was World War I—the first modern, global war—that witnessed the invention of both the modern “civilian” and the “home front,” where a totalizing war strategy pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Comprehensive and global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, Proctor examines in lucid and evocative detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries. As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict. Exploring primary source materials and secondary studies of combatant and neutral nations, while synthesizing French, German, Dutch, and English language sources, Proctor transcends the artificial boundaries of national histories and the exclusive focus on soldiers. Instead she tells the fascinating and long-buried story of the civilian in the Great War, allowing voices from the period to speak for themselves.